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Less Than a Minute to Hijack a MacBook's Wireless
Kadin2048 writes "As reported by Ars Technica and the Washington Post, two hackers have found an exploitable vulnerability in the wireless drivers used by Apple's MacBook. Machines are vulnerable if they have wireless enabled and are set to connect to any available wireless network, fairly close to their default state, and the exploit allows an attacker to gain "total access" -— apparently a remote root. Although the demo, performed via video at the BlackHat conference, takes aim at what one of the hackers calls the "Mac userbase aura of smugness on security," Windows users shouldn't get too smug themselves: according to the Post article, "the two have found at least two similar flaws in device drivers for wireless cards either designed for or embedded in machines running the Windows OS." Ultimately, it may be the attacks against embedded devices which are the most threatening, since those devices are the hardest to upgrade. Currently there have not been any reports of this vulnerability 'in the wild.'" According to this story at ITwire.com, they were able to exploit Linux and Windows machines, too. (Thanks to Josh Fink.)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
This exploit is OS independent. How is this in any way indicative of Mac user smugness? Are they so smug that they made Windows and Linux boxes explotable too?
Even more disturbing, IMO, is the suggestion in the article that Microsoft will become the ultimate arbiter of device driver safety in Vista, by preventing device drivers from being loaded that they haven't checked out and approved.... because we all know that Microsoft are the experts when it comes to detecting and correcting software vulnerabilities.
If the flaws are in Apple's drivers, why did they need to plug a 3rd party card into the MacBook? What user would ever plug a 3rd party redundant wireless card into their computer? Presumably, if they could hack Apple's drivers they wouldn't need the other card. All this video shows is a 3rd party wireless card with crappy drivers.
Well, this argument, being used toward Linux users or Mac users, has to stop. We all know that there has been flaws in linux kernel, Mac OS X and windows XP. They are known, thay are published and for most of them corrected. We all know there are more, waiting to be discovered.
BUT, and you'll notice this is a capital 'but', I have never seen a worm propagate across linux computers (I don't know for macs, I'm not a user of these). I mean, in the 98 era, windows computers were plagued with these. In the pre-SP1 era too. I have never seen a *single* self-propagating thingie for linux. The first one to do such a feat would get a lot of credit in the "scene" (if such a thing still exists). I, for one, believe that the security design of the OS is not stranger to this clean record.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Two important facts: Nobody has actually seen an active exploit; there is only a video available. Quite obviously anyone can hack into a Macintosh if it is prepared in the right way, for example by turning file sharing on and allowing everyone in the world access. More important, the video should a Macintosh notebook with an external wireless card. Now how many Macs have an external wireless card? For several years, all the notebooks have been shipping with built-in wireless connection, including the one in the video.
I would suspect that the problem is that a wireless connection can be created without knowledge of the user, and a user who has a Macintosh that was made vulnerable but should be safe because it has no network connection would unexpectedly be unsafe.
Since every Mac laptop comes with a built-in wireless card, why would anyone use a third-party card (other than for experimentation to find vulnerabilities in third-party cards)? I infer from the use of the third-party card in the video that the built-in Airport card does NOT have the indicated vulnerability.
"they have a VIDEO!!! to prove it and they are going to show it, uh, someplace."
In theory you have a point, but
it wasn't "someplace" but Black Hat US 2006.
Maybe It's worth mentioning that instead of the internal airport device they cracked an external USB Wireless Device attached to the MacBook which is IMHO not "fairly close to their default state". (Although that does not tell us anything about the security of the MacBook's airport)
My God people do some research. These guys used a 3rd party card because they don't want to reveal what hardware is vulnerable. As for operating systems, the one (and only) reason they chose to use a Mac was for shock value. Windows and Linux are both vulnerable, though if there are any exploits you can bet good money they'll be on Windows and not Mac OSX or Linux.
This is disgusting. No matter how many stories you run about Mac OSX and how it "really isn't secure" two facts will remain:
1) It's more secure than Windows. There are both less flaws and less exploits. It doesn't matter why, it's still true and, most likely, it will remain true for a long time to come. It's difficult to prove which has less flaws because neither is open source, but I think all of you, no matter how devoted to Microsoft you are, know deep down what would happen if both systems went open source tomorrow. It's very easy to prove which has less exploits, and it makes no difference whether that's because of less flaws, a different user base, a smaller user base, or some combination of the three because the net effect is a safer OS. Even if you disagree with the statement that OS X has less flaws on the basis that you believe it is secretly harboring more crappy code than Windows my second argument still holds.
2) There are almost never any malicious programs of any kind spread among Mac OS X users, unless you count people sharing copies of Windows XP to be installed with BootCamp. This may change in the future, but I doubt it.
Haiku for you!
You may notice that one of the guys was in CS grad school. He's presenting results at a conference. His academic credibility is on the line.
Not actually demonstrating your methods while presenting them at a conference is pretty common in other disciplines where it's really hard to lug around an X-ray diffractometer or the New Guinea Urungwi tribe. In CS it's different, but I think the risk of interception is a pretty good excuse.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
"fairly close to their default state" -- two problems with this
1) This exploit isn't based on the drivers that Apple ships -- they're third party
2) Even if they weren't, default state versus non-default can make a huge difference depending on what is changed. OpenBSD (secure by default) can be made as insecure as any other OS if you stray too far from the defaults
They hacked a wireless driver, not the OS. Just makin' a point. And the "macheads" never claim invulnerability of the OS, just that it's far mopre secure.
I love all the PC phanbois comments on that article at Ars.
Bottom line: if you are a Windows fanatic, you must love being anally raped on a continual basis. Windows is shit. Period.
1. It was done on Video, not Live. Show me the code. I want to see this "OS independent" remotely exploit any Wireless card in Promiscuous AP mode.
I want to see this work on Linux, for that matter.
2. It requires your system to be setup to automatically associate with all non-password protected APs. This is not a default setting, either; and none of the Mac users I know run their systems on this setting.
People DO tend to run their systems on "Alert me to all unprotected wireless access points", but that's all.
I don't see why everyone is so willing to accept this vulnerability. Their talking about attacking Atheros drivers on Windows, Linux, and OS X, with at least three independent driver teams working on them, with the Linux one being opensource (Madwifi). Furthermore, I don't see how you would get the same three driver stacks to exhibit the same buffer overrun to root-level excutable code, particularly a locked down Linux.
It's not protecting anyone to hide this vulnerability. Releasing the information now would prove whether or not this is real, and would permit quick resolution to this problem, particularly for the MadWifi people.
Until there's more information, I don't believe it. Even if I did believe it, without any details there's no effective way for me to protect myself. If the attack requires associating with an AP, most systems are not vulnerable. If the attack simple requires scanning avaliable APs, then every system out there is vulnerable unless Wireless is entirely disabled. Either way, it's stupid not to release the details, and reeks of more "Mac's aren't safe! See! Buy Norton Antivirus for the Mac!".
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Actually, it's not uncommon in CompSci conferences to only present rigged demos. Most conference papers, however, are peer-reviewd before they are accepted[1]. One common question on the review forms is whether a grad student could implement the presented idea based solely on the paper.
[1] In many other disciplines it is the other way around; the conference presentation is part of the review process, and papers presented at a conference may not make it into the printed proceedings (in which case they can't be referenced and do nothing for your academic reputation).
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It is a "Mac/Windows/Linux/whatever" issue. Those operating systems choose to use binary only drivers that can be full of obvious security holes because they were written by hardware guys who kinda know some C, instead of by experienced, security concious developers. Using the reverse engineered open source driver from openbsd completely negates this exploit, because the openbsd developers don't write shit code. Shitty code that you can't even see or change is the problem, not running device drivers in the kernel (where they belong).
I'm curious.
This "Fact" you say exists... What evidence do you have to support this fact?
Are you sure it's not merely your opinion?
Kids: PC's are owned through Windows. This is a fact. Own a PC, get hacked, this is the way it is.
Macs are so secure that A STORY about a third party wireless carded being hacked gets national-level coverage.
The PC owners rejoicing over the Mac's equivalence to their vulnerable platforms are being ridiculous. The quantifiable risk ratio between operating a Windows laptop and a MacBook is practically infinite, as there are no known virii for MacBooks, no known owning of MacBooks, no known security risks in operating a MacBook. At this point, hackers are well aware of a large installed userbase for Apple products, and certainly would attack them. If they could. Obviously they can't.
Silly people. Don't forget to run your virus and spyware checkers today. And back up your data, you never know when the bad guys will nail your hard drive in new and exciting ways through yet another buffer overflow in Windows.
Note that if you research the article a bit, you'll find that the "researchers" didn't hack the MacBook through the built-in wireless adaptor, they actually used a 3rd party wireless card plugged into it. They did it on a Mac just for the publicity storm they hoped it would generate (and lookie here, they were right).
So all the crap about "Oh oh, now your Mac is just as insecure as a Windows Box" is really, well, wrong.
And researchers deserves the double-quotes in my opinion; anyone with a nickname like "Jonny Cache" seems a bit silly to me in the first place.
What, they has two guys in black shirts with messed up hair standing around to beat them up if they used the Mac card?
It makes no sense, and so it sounds like a load to me.
Also, the fact that they go through all this work to find one possible flaw means that Mac owners should still be smug.
No, I don't own a Mac.
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